Book description
The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, 'Pale
Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy
commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on
campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive,
intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his
wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the
fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should.
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful
whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a
glorious literary conundrum.
Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author
of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was born in St Petersburg. He wrote his
first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as
a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most
famously,
Lolita
. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems
and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one
of the most outstanding Russian migr writers.
